CASH CARRY

FRIDAY, APRIL 4. Liar Liar, the new hit comedy starring Jim Carrey, just passed the $ 100 million mark, and fifteen of those dollars came from my wallet. I was eager to see Liar Liar even though Carrey’s track record isn’t very good. After sensational lowbrow turns in Ace Ventura: Pet Detective and The Mask, Carrey’s three subsequent movies were agonizing. (I fled Ace Ventura: When Nature Calls after half an hour when a joke about spittle nearly caused me to return the Raisinets I had lately ingested back to their box.)

Carrey is the latest incarnation of a long-standing show-business conundrum — the Intolerable Genius. He has been put on this earth with every bit of performing talent known to man; there is, it seems, nothing he cannot do, and nothing he cannot make his body do, in hopes of pleasing an audience. If he had chosen to be only a dancer, he would have rivaled Astaire, as scenes in both The Mask and a little-known vampire comedy called Once Bitten demonstrate. He was brilliant in his one dramatic turn as an alcoholic screw- up in a hey-ain’t-we-dysfunctional? TV movie called Doing Time on Maple Drive. And he spent four years on the TV sketch-comedy show In Living Color showing off his unrivaled abilities as an impressionist, his Sinatra- like pipes, and the astonishing dexterity that makes him the most formidable physical comedian since Buster Keaton.

Carrey is a genius, just as Danny Kaye and Sammy Davis, Jr. were before him. And yet, just as Kaye and Davis taxed one’s endurance to the limit with the way they shamelessly milked their own gifts, Carrey too is frequently intolerable. He is so desperately eager to “kill,” to use a stand-up comedy term, that he cannot let up for a minute. He mugs, he preens, he pratfalls; he’s always, always working, and you always, always see the work.

Liar Liar features Carrey at his most manic, and though it isn’t a very interesting movie, he is nothing short of amazing. Playing an inveterate liar who suddenly finds it impossible to tell an untruth, Carrey converts his entire body into a walking, talking, grinning, tortured, and terrified faux pas in an effort to keep from uttering words of truth that will only get him into trouble.

There is nothing intolerable about him in these scenes; he is entirely in character, and screamingly funny. The problem is what Carrey does before he is overcome by the tell-the-truth spell. He is supposed to be a charming, funny, relaxed seducer, a decent but weak-willed guy who relies on his remarkably quick wit to get out of scrapes. Instead, Carrey hams it up as mercilessly in these opening sequences as he does when he is playing a man beset by magic.

Though I enjoyed Liar Liar, the cool night air was a welcome relief after 90 minutes trapped in the dark with a lunatic. Carrey is clearly so worried that he will lose the audience, as he did in the very first moment of The Cable Guy when he opened his mouth and began speaking with a ghastly lisp, that he hits the screen going 300 miles an hour and never stops. You want to slap him in the face, grab him, stare into his eyes, and yell: ” Less is more!”

But for the Intolerable Genius, less is never more. And that may be why there’s always one Intolerable Genius at any given time in movie history — but never more than one. The hyperactive Robin Williams and Steve Martin were Carrey’s immediate Intolerable Genius predecessors, but they have since both settled down and now threaten, instead, to become Intolerable Institutions.

The truth is that the Intolerable Genius is not really cut out for movie stardom. Movie stars rarely overdo things; indeed, one of the qualities that make an actor a movie star is his ability to convey emotion while remaining as immobile as possible. Since movies take an actor’s face and blow it up to 40 times its size, every millimeter of movement is recorded, every gesture accentuated. A great movie actor does most of his work with his eyes.

SATURDAY, APRIL 5. The Godfather has been reissued with a refurbished soundtrack, and though it is a movie I have no need to see again — The Godfather is the only video I have ever owned and I already know it practically by heart, including the scenes with dialogue in Sicilian dialect – – Francis Coppola and Co. get another 15 bucks off of me.

The Godfather runs three hours and two minutes, and in all that time there is only one — one! — false moment. That’s when Al Pacino, as Michael Corleone, looks at his soon-to-be-wife, Diane Keaton, and says portentously, “Who’s being naive, Kay?” after she points out that senators and congressmen don’t get people killed.

That momentary spasm of anachronistic Vietnam-era phoniness aside, The Godfather is perfect. I didn’t expect to find anything new in it this time, but today’s showing has finally revealed to me why it is the greatest movie ever made. For twenty years I have been trying to figure it out without success. I tried “It’s the great American saga” for a while, but no movie about a crime family can be the great American saga, even if its first words are, “I believe in America.”

Then there’s the “it’s the great family saga” explanation, but that too is nonsense. For a family saga, there is surprisingly little family interaction in The Godfather. Al Pacino shares more screen time with Richard Castellano, who plays the family adviser Clemenza, than he does with Marlon Brando, who plays his father.

Today I surrender to the truth: There is no explaining why The Godfather is a great work of popular art. It is simply a triumph of narrative and character.

The Godfather is the best-told, bestacted, and most thrillingly conceived of movies; it has a terrific structure, brilliant dialogue, uncanny acting, all in the service of a fascinating and resonant story about complicated and interesting people. That is what we go to the movies for; it should not be surprising that the movie to do it best is the best movie.

SUNDAY, APRIL 6. Don’t you hate movie critics (excepting me, of course)? There is only one species of critic worse, and that is a TV critic (another of my professions).

Movie and TV critics are the kinds of people who think that specious drivel like The People vs. Larry Flynt is worthy of the word “masterpiece,” that any small-screen movie about a lesbian soldier deserves an Emmy — and that the wonderful new Bette Midler comedy That Old Feeling is a stiff.

That Old Feeling opened two days ago to lousy reviews, and even though I know not to trust critics, when a comedy gets unanimously panned, prudence is called for. Its director, Carl Reiner, is unusually ham-fisted, and its screenwriter, Leslie Dixon, hasn’t been heard of since the fitfully amusing Outrageous Fortune ten years ago (also starring Midler). Plus, the poster is very ugly, which is never a good sign.

No cause for concern. That Old Feeling is an unexpected joy — and one I hesitate to praise too much because it is a treat to discover an unheralded gem for yourself. It is a late-century version of The Awful Truth, the classic screwball comedy with Cary Grant and Irene Dunne as a divorced couple who break up each other’s romances and come back together. Only in this case, Midler and ex-husband Dennis Farina have been divorced for fourteen years, have since married others, and only find each other again at their daughter’s wedding.

If it sounds like a stale idea for a sex farce, rest assured that this is only the beginning. One of the most delightful aspects of That Old Feeling is that it really isn’t about Midler and Farina. The movie gives equal farcical weight to their deservedly jilted spouses, their daughter, their new son-in-law, and a paparazzo who has made a career of photographing Midler (she plays an aging movie star).

Midler is at her most relaxed and amusing, and Farina delivers on the comic promise he showed as the overly proud gangster in Get Shorty. (David Rasche plays Midler’s current husband, a therapist who slowly and hilariously unwinds when his Prozac supply runs out.) But the movie really shines a light on Paula Marshall, who plays the prim and nervous daughter in a performance that ought to make her a star but probably won’t because of the drubbing the movie has received.

Conservative PC alert: That Old Feeling contains some unnecessary Republican-bashing, including its very last line. (But it’s a funny line.)

MONDAY, APRIL 7. That Old Feeling gets attacked even as advance buzz on Grosse Pointe Blank is all positive. Figures. In a world in which the repugnant Pulp Fiction is considered the height not only of artistic achievement but of high fashion as well, Grosse Pointe Blank is a critic’s dream: a hip, arch, nihilistic jape about a hit man who attends his high-school reunion. It is meaningless and hateful, but so drenched in attitude that you feel as though you will be laughed at for your Babbittry if you say a harsh word about it. The audience at the critics’ screening I attended tonight greeted Grosse Pointe Blank with nervous laughter and confusion, waiting to be let in on the joke the way crowds try to look blase outside trendy nightspots so that the doormen will let them inside the hallowed halls of Cool.

John Cusack, who co-wrote and stars in the thing, is a spectacularly talented young actor with an uncommon gift for playing intelligent people. He also has a pretentious streak and very poor judgment — in fourteen years he has been in only two decent movies, The Sure Thing and Say Anything. He is, instead, attracted to movies dripping with embarrassingly jejune conspiracy theories. He was in two of the worst political movies of our time, True Colors and City Hall (in the latter he played a 25-year-old deputy mayor of New York who spoke, for no particular reason, in a Louisiana accent). Now, in Grosse Pointe Blank, he gives a culminating speech about his training as a hit man at the hands of the CIA, which encouraged the homicidal tendencies that led him to flee from his beloved high-school prom date a decade earlier.

What, exactly, leads a motion-picture company to put into production a movie with a hit man as its sympathetic central character? Grosse Pointe Blank is the second such film in as many years. The first, Cold Blooded, went directly to video and HBO, as Grosse Pointe Blank should have.

The existence of a genre dedicated to psychopathic scum is yet another reminder that Michael Medved’s prescient and hilarious Hollywood vs. America, which detailed other newly minted Hollywood genres like cannibal movies and vomit movies, was the decade’s most unjustly maligned work of cultural criticism.

John Podhoretz is deputy editor of THE WEEKLY STANDARD.